When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Richard shook his head with distaste. “What are you going to do?” he asked mildly.

  He meant, how would we rebuild. Richard, as our private banker, knew very well we hadn’t any money. I’d had to borrow from him already the year before when we fell behind in our property taxes, and I hadn’t paid him back yet. I was light-headed, so I sat down on a dead tree fallen by the drive. I looked at my filthy old kilt, my skinny legs blotched with eczema, stuck in rubber boots.

  Richard stood over me. “You’re going to need a loan to rebuild,” he said. “Almost no interest, just to cover my costs.”

  I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. He had been good to us. I suppose I was being perverse, but I decided then that I’d never tell him how Helen died. It was our private property, and I felt we needed something of our own just then.

  With watery eyes, Richard sought Dianna. Dianna snapped to attention, as if he’d called her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “DON’T WORRY,” HELEN SAYS. “The wind does not soothe, but the idea of wind soothes.” Helen’s hand strokes our hair. “Don’t worry any more.”

  The memorials to the flood were a lot of new houses with plywood walls and teak veneer. But Bill (with Jack’s help and Richard’s money) built a graceful wood structure at the edge of their butterfly field. Marie’s grotto was nothing but four corner posts and an iron stove. But that is where Jack wanted to be, and he rebuilt the cabin much as Marie’s old place had been, following the logic of the stone base and the trees. Soon after, Marie returned. I saw her shadow walking in the woods. She looked content. Jack thought she was content too. “She keeps an eye on me,” he said.

  Elsewhere on “our property,” because of Ida’s political affiliations, we were subject to a different kind of surveillance. The clicking phone, the occasional gleam of a camera lens. It was nutty, but the Canadian government saw Russian spies under every bush, and Ida was a sure candidate. While Ida and Bill, Eli and I protected ourselves with a level of duplicity thin as eggshell, Dianna was open to surveillance. She couldn’t possibly understand solitude, having never experienced it. She understood the world as a diagram or a formal plan upon which our mad relationships ricocheted between points of observation. I guess she was a physicist. She saw the world as lines connected by force.

  Her childhood was constructed out of wartime propaganda, but she was drawn into pubescence with the news of the Holocaust, its mechanisms conveyed to her by her godmother, Ida, who offered this information with heroic discretion. It was an era so sordid that everyone, even Stalin, wore pyjamas. My clear-sighted granddaughter told her best school friend and the RCMP that her periods had finally started. She was the true Canadian girl.

  I never did tell Dianna about her mother’s death. Not in so many words. She saw it in the change of light, in the way time passed without mercy. But one day when I was cleaning her room, minding my own business, I came across a photograph of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, those rare birds, the discrete collection of Canadian lefties newly arrived in Spain back in ’36. The photo lay at the bottom of her drawer, hidden beneath her socks. My heart seized up, and I pulled it out. There were some handsome faces, but no one with Helen’s beauty. Then, one. A figure at the end of the line, must have been in some shadow thrown by a nearby building. A black cutout figure. Fist raised, palm forward. The optimistic, convivial group of men. And then this singular figure in the shade. I turned it over. On the back was written, “For Dianna, whose mother was brave. Jack.”

  Dianna knew that her mother was dead. But that didn’t stop her from waiting, listening for the return. It spiked her resolve, and this is maybe peculiar to daughters; the errant mother becomes a daughter’s burden, and a burden will make one hell of a loyal woman. Dianna’s loyalty would be to “our property,” the site of Helen’s abandonment and the scene of her eventual, infinitely deferred, return.

  BY THE TIME DIANNA WAS TWENTY, in 1956, her virginity was nuclear. She stayed as far away as possible from Jack, clinging to the opposite end of his lazy attraction. Jack would disappear “up North” to work for a month or two, and then come back to live in Marie’s grotto. We gave him the bottom cup of the oxbow. We couldn’t see why not. We had more than enough space, and he paid his own expenses. He wore red flannel shirts in the summertime. He drank quite a bit and he smoked pot, which didn’t help our relationship with the Mounties. But he was free of the forthright, obvious, alert egoism of the 1950s.

  Richard provided the money for Dianna to go to law school. Now her drawings were limited to the margins of law books. Buttercups bloomed over case law, the Bank Act, superior ovary, trust, sepals of calyx, inheritance tax, pistil. She wore sweater sets. She had lunch with Richard three times a week. I don’t know what they talked about, but knowing Richard, it would be free of substance and stuffed with bone-building bigotry against Indians, Jews, Communists and women. Subtle as fluoride, Richard distributed hatred as if it were in the best interests of those he hated. He was a most canny man, Richard, increasingly so with age. But Dianna, inured to speculation by her National Character, seemed unaware of Richard’s power over her. She liked his style.

  It was on a Wednesday after lunch that Dianna entered our house, humming. “Gramma,” she said, and kissed my cheek. “Where’s Ida?” Seeing Eli: “Hey, Grandpa.” She put her cheek against his scarred head.

  Eli, at ninety-something, had not lost his hand to diabetes, but his left leg was gone just under the knee. He was illegally blind, so he could still drive a car. His miraculous muscle tone was actually improved by these impairments. When Dianna came in, he was restitching the pommel of his Spanish saddle with a needle a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, pushing it through the leather with the knob of his lost thumb. I occupied a footstool beside Eli’s rocking chair. Above us, like stalactites, swung five small microphones. We looked up at Dianna. She hadn’t seen them. “What are you two smiling about?” she asked. And looked up. “Oh, my God.”

  “We were cleaning the attic,” I said.

  She walked between the mikes, waving her hand, making them sway, and started to speak but thought better of it. There was a dome of silence suspended from the rafters. For several moments, the three of us blinked at one another. The latch lifted. Bill walked in. He had dropped by when we found the first bug and was obviously surprised now to find so many. He came silently into the middle of the room and stood, his fingers pressed together in a sad sort of prayer, a spider doing push-ups on a mirror. He was so seldom compelled to speak, but this new reticence was a terrible satire.

  When Dianna suddenly spoke, I thought I’d have a heart attack. “Jurisprudence,” she said, “coterminous with fiduciary care.” With her sweater set she wore a pleated skirt. “Confidentiality,” she spoke into one mike, then another, “is intended to convey that extra quality in the relevant confidence that is implicit in the phrase ‘confidential relationship.’ ” She stopped and smiled at us, and then resumed. “Undue influence is commonly regarded as occasions when the will of one person has become so dominated by that of another that the person acts as the mere puppet of the dominator. Cf Tate v Williams, Allard v Skinner and Morley v Lough.” She made her way to the backroom—the room occupied by Ida ever since the death of Stalin and the marriage of JFK to Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. Something in the concurrence of those two events had left Ida unhinged.

  Years of police surveillance had made Ida intensely lonely. She was shadowed. We didn’t know how thin she had become until the muskrat coat finally fell apart, revealing a body ravaged by exegesis. We put her to bed, spooned honeyed milk between her lips. She whispered, “How kind,” and looked away, deliberating all possible interpretations of her words. The RCMP had decided a priori that she was a spy; their phone taps and observation were for the purposes of proving themselves right. Guilty till proven guilty, she became furtive and fraudulent. The police destroyed the integrity of her every action—brushing her teeth, mailing a letter—
leaving her with chronic indecision.

  The bugs must have been put in our rafters when we were rebuilding after the flood, when we’d had to hire out some of the work. Ida’s depression grew more severe. We knew it might be terminal. The mikes were the idols of her spooky governance. She was one of those rare people who will fall in love with mankind. Communism had reached her on a beam of light. But now she shrivelled, dry as stone.

  Even in her darkest depression, Ida never stopped reading the newspapers. Bedridden and emaciated, she renewed her subscriptions to Vochenblatt, The New Republic, The New York Times. Since Stalin’s death, information had been dribbling out about the purges. Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Stalin, his “Secret Speech,” had reached her last summer—his long exposition of mass arrests, torture, false confessions, the purposes of terror. She had had to accept the fact that the Great Terror began not long after the time that she and Helen had ridden the rails, when Communism was still a campfire. Stalin had exterminated “Fascist” minorities, the Chechens, the Ingushes, the Karachins, the Balkars, the Tartars of the Crimea, the Kalmuks and the Germans of the Volga. Ida tried desperately to remember what she was doing on the twenty-third of February, 1944—the day the entire population of the Chechen-Ingush Republic, almost a million people, were arrested and removed to an unknown destination. Stalin turned his radiant eye upon the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Greeks and Jews. Ida gave herself the task of experiencing every death. It was torture tailor-made for an imaginative social democrat.

  On the very same day we discovered the bugs in the rafters, Ida had learned that more than a hundred thousand people were fleeing the Soviets in Hungary. She understood that she had taken part in the biggest sting operation in human history.

  Grief is lonely and often full of self-hatred. Ida sat in the tablet of sunlight by the window and stared down at the buttons of her dress, her sagging breasts, stockings the colour of Band-Aids. She took a Kleenex from her pocket, blew her nose, returned it, like someone forced to care for an unpleasant relative. But she caught me looking at her from the doorway and beckoned to me. “Come in.”

  Dianna joined us, chatting, leaving gaps in the dialogue that Ida would normally occupy. When Ida finally began to speak, the objects in the room flinched ever so slightly, no more than the shiver made in objects by our sudden perception, an almost invisible standing-to. “Do you see the days get a little longer?” she asked.

  “The days are very long now!”

  “Yes! And the snow is melting!”

  “You don’t have to go overboard on my account,” said Ida. “A few minutes every day, a bit of colour in the dawn and a sunset bigger than a mackerel’s eye, that’s all I ask.”

  Life magazine saved IDA’S LIFE. Dianna brought the magazine to her to show her an ad for a movie called I Married a Communist. The Communist in question was a “Nameless, Shameless Woman! Trained in an art as old as time!” It starred Laraine Day. “Obviously,” said Ida, “I’m a blonde. With very big breasts.” She was really ill by then; perhaps she’d had a mild heart attack, I don’t know, but she was weakening. She laughed for Dianna’s benefit, and then began to cough. Dianna opened the window and the wind blew the pages of the magazine where it lay on the bed. It was the special VE day issue, full of wartime photographs. Ida stopped coughing. She went quiet. She didn’t touch the page but drew herself up till she was hovering over the magazine. The smoke from Churchill’s cigar hung in the air. Roosevelt sat in the middle and Stalin on the right. Roosevelt wore a cape over a suit, looking long of limb, capable of dance, like an artist stuck between two generals, their chubby necks squeezed by wool collars. “The Big Three at Yalta, 1945,” the caption read, “where the shape of post-war Eastern and Central Europe was decided.” Just the three of them. Doing all that.

  “The gods,” whispered Ida under her breath.

  Churchill, Roosevelt, even Stalin, took the sickness from Ida’s body and gave her back a marvellous sense of personal futility. She was a pawn. From the disease of indiscriminate social responsibility, the lion that had nearly torn her limb from limb, Ida had been saved. She felt herself shrink-wrapped, a garlic sausage, a single item on the great shelf of history, just one irregular heartbeat.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1962

  I see no end of it, but the turning upside down of the entire world. —Erasmus

  Only the gumbo is immortal. —Blondie McCormack

  IDA STARTED TO COLLECT PHOTOGRAPHS of duets and trios caught in a moment, very particular, as moments are. Sometimes, but not necessarily, deciding the shape of post-war Europe. Sometimes just hanging around.

  She was fond of one that was particularly offhand: Winston Churchill standing beside a fireplace with Canada’s secretary of state, Lester B. Pearson. Pearson, whom everybody called Mike, is smiling that toothy, wholesome smile, whereas Churchill looks dyspeptic and embarrassed. Maybe what’s embarrassing Churchill is the fact that Mike Pearson is wearing the exact same clothes as he is. Exact. The bow tie, the deep blue pinstripe suit, the watch chain; they’re doing the same thing with their hands, left hand in trouser pocket, right hand holding a cigar in front of a paunch in a vest. Ida loved that picture. They looked liked such nice men, just standing around after dinner. It helped her to start getting dressed in the morning.

  She got out of bed mostly for Dianna’s benefit. Dianna watched Ida like a baby hawk. If Ida hadn’t made it, she would have proved to Dianna that her mother had been afraid when she died. That may not be reasonable, but it’s true. So Ida rallied and tried her best to become reacquainted with the world.

  Here we were, with the Second World War vets all grown up and running the show less than twenty years after yet another armistice, and it seemed natural to consider the circumstances in which we were about to experience an atomic war. It must have been all that war-jism. Dianna accepted the threat of nuclear war as if it were a birthmark on the face of reality. Bill, Ida, Eli and I were stumped. We wanted to protect Dianna from fear, but we didn’t know how to do that, short of giving her an anaesthetic, and we did think she should be awake, aware. It was a dilemma. I had to work a miracle. So—I made a casserole and set the table.

  Soft food was just the thing. Here we were, trying to provide Dianna with a sense of terra firma in Canada, with nothing better to offer than a lunatic prime minister named John Diefenbaker, an overwrought prairie lawyer forced to play monkey in the middle between Russia and the States, two superpowers at high noon. Yes, I thought, in a pinch, make a shepherd’s pie. I sat Ida at the head of the table and passed her a quart of the casserole on a paper plate. “Worcester sauce?” I offered.

  She took it reluctantly, saying, “Why are we doing this gravy stuff?” She added grumpily, “I don’t know if I can eat.” The pressure had been building up intensely with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ida spread the shepherd’s pie miserably about her soggy plate and put down her fork, bursting out, “Let’s face it. Diefenbaker’s nuts. We’re looking at a nuclear holocaust, and we’ve got a complete nutcase as our prime minister.”

  A pause. Bill, tired, seated cross-legged on his dining-room chair and wearing his white cotton pyjamas, said, “It is a bit tricky.” We all stared into our mashed potatoes.

  “We’ve got to keep things in, um, perspective,” I said brightly. “Diefenbaker makes this country seem… small.”

  “Small,” said Bill.

  I passed the creamed corn. “Eat what’s put before you.” And went on. “Our prime minister is a Saskatchewan man. He may be paranoid, yes. But he’s paranoid in such a Canadian way.”

  “Paranoid about his Eaton’s card,” said Eli. I plucked his paw from his lap and kissed it.

  “Paranoid about the air-defence agreement with the States,” I said, waving the margarine before Ida’s nose.

  “Paranoid about being a nuclear ballboy,” said Eli.

  “I’m proud of that,” I said. “I really am.”

  Eli’s blood sugar took a sudden surge
. “Diefenbaker hates being a serf to the Americans.”

  “He hates it!” chimed Bill.

  “For sure!” said Eli.

  Ida peered at Eli and Bill, through a glass darkly. Suddenly she figured it out, turned to Dianna and chirped, “What a guy!” and bit into a slice of Wonder Bread.

  Dianna watched Ida chew. “Paranoid about Kennedy,” she said, as if in her sleep.

  Bill moved over to crouch at his daughter’s side. “Khrushchev’s not paranoid about Kennedy,” he said softly. “Khrushchev’s worried about Kennedy.” Bill ran his hand over Dianna’s forehead. “Nobody’s going to be paranoid any more, Dianna. The war is over. We’re at peace.” His lie sat on the table. Ida cleared her throat, embarrassed.

  “President Kennedy thinks Prime Minister Diefenbaker is an idiot,” said Dianna. “That’s what Richard says.” She yawned.

  “Shhhhh,” said Bill.

  “Dief doesn’t care,” I lullabied. “He’s used to that kind of thing. He’s a Western Canadian.”

  We had strawberry cheesecake with whipped cream in the living room, with the TV on but the sound off. Ida kept shaking her head, saying, “What is this stuff?” I followed it up with a nice cup of Ovaltine, turning down the lights, speaking softly, “Diefenbaker wants the North, like a frontier. Imagine. An enormous landscape with a tiny ecosystem, huge and fragile as an obese little girl.” Ida yawned. Dianna laid her head upon her godmother’s shoulder. I removed their plates, softly, softly. “One sneeze with DDT and every gull’s egg falls to pieces.”

  “That was rather good,” said Ida. She couldn’t keep her eyes open.

  We were stuffed into obeisance. Outside caromed the moonless night. The sky was a bulletproof ceiling, remote-controlled, ready to fall on our heads. Ida had come up. And the governments had bunkers underground, and the missiles were hidden in submarines in the surrounding seas and in thick lead silos buried deep in the deserts. Ida said she could hear the missiles whistling down under the earth. She always did have good hearing.